Rome’s Palazzo Altemps to host exhibition by Romanian artist Mircea Cantor

Palazzo Altemps, one of the sites of the National Roman Museum, will host, beginning next week, an exhibition of works by Mircea Cantor. Titled Constellations of Antiquity , the show has been conceived as a site-specific intervention, where the collection of ancient sculptures housed by the museum enters into a dialogue with the fifteen works and installations created by the artist. "From the very beginning of my career, I have been interested in the relationship between art and the past. One field to which I feel particularly connected is archaeology. For me, as an artist, the direct contact with discoveries from the past, in museums and archaeological sites, is an invaluable source of questions, knowledge, and constant inspiration; a way of seeking answers by lifting the veils and connecting these testimonies and findings with masterpieces from the history of art," the artist explains. Born in Oradea in 1977, Mircea Cantor lives and works in Paris. His works are part of public and private art collections such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the UNESCO Collection in Paris, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Rennie Collection in Vancouver, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Castello di Rivoli and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, the Smithsonian, the Kramlich Collection in Napa Valley, the Pinault Collection, Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach, Germany, the Musée d'arts de Nantes, and Magasin III Museum for Contemporary Art in Stockholm. He is a recipient of the Marcel Duchamp Prize (2011) and the Fondation d'Entreprise Ricard Prize (2004). He was awarded the title of Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Republic in 2019 and the National Order of Cultural Merit in the rank of Knight by Romania in the same year. The exhibition is on view from July 10 to September 27. (Photo: Joruba